The Sticky Race Politics of First-Person Shooters

If we learned anything from the flap over the feature in the Medal of Honor
video game that allowed gamers to play as a Taliban insurgent
fighting the U.S.—which provoked so much outrage
that the feature was removed—it's that people take virtual warfare
seriously. Even if the combat is simulated, its cultural implications
are not. First-person shooter games, a market worth hundreds of millions of dollars,
are not going away. But as the technology progresses, making
the experience look and feel more real, there is more
attention on how video game companies design recreational warfare. A
current focal point of that attention, as explained in an essay by Jim Gourley for Foreign Policy, is race.

Gourley
writes that race has become an increasingly controversial issue in
shooter games as they shift from the old paradigm of fantasy
zombie-shooters or futuristic alien warfare into more recognizable
modern warfare against human enemies. Medal of Honor's decision
to set a game in the very real Afghan War is just one example. What
kinds of people is it socially acceptable for you to spend an afternoon
killing in a video game? Which are not? It's complicated.

2008's Resident Evil 5
ran into opposition because it changed the location of the gameplay
from Western civilization to Africa. Protests and polemic ensued shortly
after players remarked that the game's white protagonists ran all over
the place killing predominantly black zombies. No one bats an eye at
games like Delta Force or Bad Company, though, in which
the "terrorists" and "insurgents" are of homogenously Middle Eastern
descent. These games are available in bulk at any AAFES location. Nor
does anyone debate the racial distribution in shooters set in World War
II.

But the cultural standards are inconsistent. Gourley writes
that, in one game set in Iraq, "Everyone plays the good guy, and the
game simply paints the world red or blue based on your perspective. To
your teammates, you look like Specialist Jones in standard issue ACUs.
To your opponents, you look like an Arab with a ski mask and shemagh."
The generic, racially defined "enemy" in this game, which has created no
controversy, reveals that we are OK with games that ask us to kill
Middle Eastern-looking enemies. It's not about who you pretend to kill,
it's about whose virtual shoes you wear when you do the killing. "It can
only be assumed then that Infinity Ward's crime was in explicitly
naming the killers, making the context for their actions as realistic as
the graphics, and then giving us the opportunity to act as our own
enemies." Gourley concludes with an anecdote from his military service,
which shows just how complicated and contradictory these video game
politics can be.

I watched my troops in Iraq play Grand Theft Auto
constantly during their free time, even on days we ran convoy escorts
through Mosul. They used a game simulating swapping paint and
threatening motorists with assault rifles as a way to unwind from a hard
day of swapping paint and threatening motorists with assault rifles.
Those are anecdotes, but if you know more than one soldier that's been
overseas, you probably know a soldier that took a video game system with
them.